6 comments:

Re the Sheandoah Valley, (cf. puddle's note on the previous thread), I remember seeing it from the airplane flying to DC from San Francisco. Actually seeing it from the air made it incredibly obvious what a strategic route it was during the Civil War--like no book or map possibly could. I remember Grant's instructions to Sheridan:

"Leave nothing to invite the enemy to return.... Let the valley be left so that crows flying over it will have to carry their rations along with them."

Off to visit with Naomi and do some shopping tomorrow. Good luck to Felix Baungartner and the Red Bull Stratos team! Maybe I can catch the ascent live on the web.

Then we spent the afternoon running errands, which gave us a sense of accomplishment.

I've decided that in the midst of sooo much grieving I need to do some things that are creative and concrete. First thing is a big reorg of my clothes closet situation. That might sound trite, but if it takes frustration out of life, it's worth it. My tolerance for frustration is too low right now. Next I'm thinking of painting the front hallway.

Small things and definitely not expensive. The closet reorg involves putting in two hanger bars. The hallway is small enough to cover with one gallon of paint. But recalling that while Bush was bombing Iraq we redid our kitchen, I realised I need to do something creative to balance out all the loss.

Howzabout that Felix Baumgartner? Great achievement, and he seems like a pretty good guy. It was a rather nice touch (although I'm sure it wasn't intentional) that he didn't quite break Joe Kittinger's record for the longest time in freefall.

Oddly little traffic going to the Bay Area this morning; Miyoko suggested it was because people were in church, and I suggested they were watching the parachute jump [grin]. Nice visit with Naomi. Her company has over 200 employees now; about 20 or 22 when she was hired 2.5 years ago. It seems the company is starting to seriously work on improving the quality of their cell phone games rather than just push them out the door as fast as possible, which pleases her. And talk about coincidences--a young family (husband, wife and small daughter) moved into the apartment just across the landing from hers, and it turned out he works for SEGA, which recently bought a computer game company in San Francisco! It just about blew them away when she realized they were Japanese and began speaking to them in Japanese. We gave her some super-sized Japanese persimmons for them, that we picked from one of our trees. (The other tree is more strongly alternate bearing, and had no fruit at all this year. The mechanism of alternate bearing in persimmons is interesting; I realized that a tree puts out a single branch of male blossoms every other year--the flowers are kind of weird looking.)